Try to remember when you first heard her: It was strange and somehow touching, different and faraway. Well, since Bjork's first solo album, "Debut," released in 1993, nothing has changed.

On her latest album, "Vespertine," Bjork is doing what she has done many times before: continuously oscillating on the border of a blurred note, adding distortion to a shriek, being soft as a feather and fierce as a child. She sticks to her own concept of melody. Her music continues to live in an alien world, but feels real.

Perhaps the whole of this album does have a sense of Bjork's greater confidence or, rather, more determined stride to feel authentic without overdoing it. It does not exhibit the roughness of her previous work, the strained need to push the limits in experimenting, exciting, depressing or astounding. By contrast, "Vespertine" even features a few tracks that could certainly become pop hits, what with their mellow smoothness.

The usual minimalist ambient background and touches of break-beat are this time supplied by various computer wizards: San Francisco computer duo Matmos, Matthew Herbert, Console's Martin Gretschmann and the German group Oval.

To be frank, the phenomenon of this Icelandic singer's widespread popularity has always been a pleasant mystery to me, even though I've never been a big fan of her music. And, as I see it, the track that perhaps explains one of the secret appeals of Bjork is "Pagan Poetry," where she presents singing in a new or, rather, very, very old light; as a ritual, as a sort of dialogue between the self and some hidden soul: "I love him, I love him," cries Bjork – "She loves him, she loves him," her unconscious shadow echoes time and time again.